Steve Jobs through Rosen-colored glasses

Wall Street’s first Apple evangelist — and the former chairman of Compaq — reminisces

The 140-word Wikipedia entry on Benjamin M. Rosen hardly does him justice. For more than a decade — starting in 1980 when he left Morgan Stanley and co-founded Sevin Rosen Management — Ben Rosen was personal computing’s most influential power broker, a visionary financier who backed dozens of high-tech start-ups, including Compaq, Citrix, Cyprus, Lotus, Silicon Graphics and Electronic Arts.

The man Mike Moritz in The Little Kingdom described as looking like a “demure orthodontist, with thinning silver hair and owl-eyed spectacles” was also Apple’s (AAPL) best friend on Wall Street in the late 70s and early 80s. In his blog Through Rosen-colored glasses Rosen, now 78, reminisced Saturday about the early days, the middle years, and his last contact with Steve Jobs — a 2007 e-mail to let him know that the former chairman of Compaq had happily switched to a Mac.